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Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness

• dogleash 5y ago
  Measured performance vs. actual performance is a big confounder to taking this at face value. How many times have you met a surly person that absolutely nails the un-glamorous but essential tasks that prevent parts of an organization from falling apart?
• eterevsky 5y ago
  This checks out with my personal experience. My absolute worst performance period fell on my very unhappy short-lived marriage. Soon after I got a divorce and got into a healthy relationship, I was promoted.
• throwaway874653 5y ago
  During interview my HR told they only recurit happy people and asked me if i am happy. I got the job
• hestefisk 5y ago
  Stating the bleeding obvious. The level of BS in some of this management / MBA pseudo science literature gets a bit tiring.
• perchanceturt 5y ago
• Tucanix 5y ago
  As someone stuck in the lower class almost unable to work and any work I do is very distressing because I'm someone who is chronically disabled with chronic debilitating pain and an array of other problems that are no fault of my own: Ain't this some bullshit. It sure is easy for the rich to say "just be happy", "just follow your goals" etc. It's so easy for people with opportunities to say that, is it any wonder the richest people I know are also the happiest.. I wouldn't be surprised if the people in this study are in higher positions than the rest and have less stress and demands put on them in their daily lives.
• pella 5y ago
  suggestions ( via MIT Sloan ) 1. Measure happiness in both employees and job candidates. 2. Develop happiness in your workforce. 3. Retain employees who are happy.
  • PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    On one hand, this seems like a minefield of potential issues. If you build processes to measure "happiness" and make retain/fire decisions based on it, you're going to get a lot of fake happiness as soon as the employees figure it out. A lot. However, in the past I've made the mistake of trying to retain angry, unhappy, or otherwise disgruntled employees too long. Some people are just irreversibly angry in life and will find a way to be upset about everything. Leaving them in the company will start to bring everyone down. If someone is clearly miserable at your company and you've made efforts to address their problems with no improvement, it's time to remove them.
    • roschdal 5y ago
    • galaxyLogic 5y ago
      But it might be that if people pretend to be happy they try to invent reasons why they should be happy and as they tell themselves and others why they (say they) are happy they start being a bit more happy. If you really want to fake happiness the best way is to try to be happy
      • dustymcp 5y ago
        Fake it till you make it
        • lazide 5y ago
          Having personally had to deal with folks whose strategy in the face of hard times is faking being happy? Yikes. Delusion is dangerous.
• drewcoo 5y ago
  Happy people don't change the world. They maintain the status quo. "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - Shaw https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/536961-the-reasonable-man-adapts-himself-to-the-world-the-unreasonable https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/536961-the-reasonable-man-a...
  • adra 5y ago
    I'd argue lazy people don't often change the world and probably not people who are drunk/high all the time. I'd argue self worth and personal happiness doesn't eliminate ones desire to positively change society (same with rich people), though it may be less common. Lincoln was a rich white guy who still did good things. Tons of CEOs are money obsessed miserable sociopaths whos greatest contributions will be adding some zeros to their net worth.
    • ramraj07 5y ago
      Lazy people change the world all the time. Not the universally lazy ones, just the lazy ones that are still responsible.
      • droopyEyelids 5y ago
        This little debate is a good example of how difficult it can be to communicate meaningfully about huge topics. Everything said in this topic has a certain amount of ‘truth’ to it.
    • onion2k 5y ago
      I'd argue lazy people don't often change the world... There are two sorts of lazy people. One group don't put any effort in, they avoid work, and they leave things as they are. These are the "bad lazy" people. They maintain the status quo. The other sort of lazy people see something that takes effort and think of ways to achieve the same end result with less effort. They're the automates, the refactorers, the long term thinkers. They're the "good lazy" people who create positive change because they enable people to do more. They maintain the status quo where necessary, but also create room for improvement. "good lazy" people don't cause industry changing disruption on a massive scale. "good lazy" doesn't invent Uber or Amazon. But I would argue that they are the cause of a lot of small, incremental changes over time, which actually has a bigger effect on our lives. It just happens too slowly for us to notice.
• cube00 5y ago
  > While many — if not most — of us are motivated by genuine caring for the people who power our organizations, we also intuitively know that employee happiness should boost job performance. I have a hard time believing that "many — if not most" people in management are actually motivated by this.
  • throwaway5486nv 5y ago
  • i_like_waiting 5y ago
    I am not, you can add it as a data point. Its just work, you are probably not caring about your manager outside of your performance review. And thats fair.
    • DerArzt 5y ago
      I care about my immediate co-workers as people, but as employees & bosses not so much.
    • mrtranscendence 5y ago
      I absolutely care about my manager, for what it's worth. I've generally (luckily) had very good relationships with basically all my managers, and it's tended to pay off well, even though I'd still care if it didn't pay off.
  • daniel_iversen 5y ago
    Why? Are you saying people in general don't care about other people's happiness, or just that managers are special and don't care? I believe we care about people in close connection to us (family, friends, employees) but it becomes harder to truly relate the further away and larger the number of people are and it becomes more abstract (hence why it's hard to fix global health and poverty etc). I think there's even a psychological need to care about others once we've fed ourselves and achieved basic securities.
  • agumonkey 5y ago
• jimkleiber 5y ago
  > We first asked them to rate their well-being — their happiness, if you will — along with their optimism, and then tracked which soldiers later received awards based on their job performance. I'm curious to dig into the paper more because at first glance, I feel somewhat confused they seem to say happiness and well-being and optimism are all essentially the same thing. Again, maybe their paper doesn't say that and it's just their attempt to summarize it, and maybe some people see those three as different words for the same concept, yet I imagine many wouldn't.
  • keyraycheck 5y ago
    or is it other way around? i.e. High performers are happier and more optimistic. So cause and affect is reversed
    • endymi0n 5y ago
      The study answers this question (at least partly) by measuring happiness levels _before_ the job.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • jimkleiber 5y ago
      I'm not sure if your comment was in response to my comment, as I was trying to say that I believe happiness != well being != optimism.
• rob74 5y ago
  > Which comes first, succeeding and then being happy, or being happy and then succeeding? Er, that sounds suspiciously like the eternal question "which came first, the chicken or the egg?". If you start off with a "happy" state of mind because of "external" reasons, you are probably more likely to succeed at work too, but of course your work also should contribute to maintaining your happiness. So it's either a virtuous cycle of success at work (without having to invest all of your time into it!) leading to a better overall life; or a balance of work being (negatively) stressful and you needing to "recharge" in your spare time (family life, friends, hobbies...); or a vicious cycle of your work burning you out and also leading to personal problems - of course, a positive attitude helps, but IMHO asking the simplistic question "which comes first" is as dumb as in the chicken-and-egg example...
  • foo_barrio 5y ago
    The chicken/egg question always irks me. Eggs came first. Eggs have existed far longer than chickens (eg dinosaur eggs). Whatever the first thing we could possibly call a chicken came from an egg.
    • xmprt 5y ago
      You're right but for the people who are confused, it's because of the semantics of the question. If you specify the question a little more and ask "What came first? The chicken or the chicken egg" then the question is how do you define a chicken egg. Is it the egg that comes from a chicken or the egg that a chicken hatches from. In the first case, the chicken came first and in the second case, the egg came first. I think it's obvious the the second case makes more sense but some people might argue.
      • coldtea 5y ago
        The deeper question is not really about which came before in any random pair of "chicken and its chicken egg" or "chicken egg and its chicken". It's about how chickens and chicken eggs emerge (first means "very very first"), and it's supposed to point to this paradox: If you need both chickens to have chicken eggs, and chicken eggs to produce a chicken, how did either came about? E.g. did something non-chicken-yet that could lay eggs suddenly laid a chicken egg? Or did a non-chicken egg suddenly produce a chicken? and so on...
• legulere 5y ago
  Maybe potential top performers are unhappy because of how the company prevents them from performing?
  • throwaway984393 5y ago
    winner winner chicken dinner
• NalNezumi 5y ago
  >You might dismiss these results if you believe that military data somehow doesn’t apply to the business world, but you would be wrong to do so. After all, the U.S. Department of Defense is the single largest employer in the world, dwarfing Walmart by nearly 1 million employees I don't think anyone dismiss the data taken only from the military because of their workforce size & variety of positions (as indicated later) but because their task/goal is very unique to other private companies where the (primary) goal is making a profit, and the fact that at the military, sizable proportion of the employee might be in a high stress, life-or-death situation (the data was taken under Iraq/Afgan war) . All in all this seems like a "checked all the boxes for a good study; but still whimsical result" kind of study. (I guess that's why it went to a low impact factor Journal) I still would prefer HR people take recommendations from this article, such as: "Measure happiness in both employees & job candidates" at face value rather than wasting their time in BS Personality-type and pseudo-IQ tests for hiring/managing project groups Edit: Might also add that (to me) it makes no sense to equate "getting a medal" to performance, when they also claim "Military also have non-combatant jobs!" as the basis for generalization of the study; yea but your success metric doesn't take that in to account? Does military-chefs get medals for extra-ordinary dishes? Does safety technicians get medals for "extra-ordinary safety"?
  • endymi0n 5y ago
    While you're entitled to your own opinion, I can safely say this study matches my own observations 100%. Having hired and led over a hundred engineers, I wasn't surprised of the magnitude of this finding at all. Yes, happy people get easily worn down in bureaucratical organizations. Some of them adapt and get cynical. Some of them quit and join organizations where they can be happy and effective. It's the best part of my day to work among many of them.
    • onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
      I wonder how much this has to do with complaining. In my experience - not all unproductive people are complainers - but almost all complainers are not productive. The productive people are proactive and start making change rather than complain. I haven't met a lot of unhappy proactive people.
• ThinkBeat 5y ago
  Most people, esp. in the US especially and in Western Europe in general fake happiness. esp in public. With true friends less. US: I lost my job. I am so happy. It was time for a change, and I know there are so many better opportunities out there. Russia: I was fired from my job. It sucks. How am I to find a new job in this economy? What am I to do? Followed by vodka with friends. (Stereotypes that may or may not be exaggerated) Managers reading this will demand happiness, so people must fake it even more. and they must fake it all day long at work. Work Survey: Are you HAPPY? Yes? (Manager wants it) No? (Won't get promoted, won't get anywhere) It is impossible to engineer long term true happiness. Or at least nobody has figured it out yet. Drugs, floggings (must improve your happiness), bright colored cubicle, A new Ferrari every quarter. One could aim for "contentment". Even that is unattainable for most people. When it comes to soldiers WTF? Victim shaming? Soldiers are successful because they are happy? Thus if you are unhappy, depressed, PTSD, all that happened because you were not happy. (Stretching it a little for effect). This all reminds me of evangelical churches. (Who also forces people to be happy) > God Heals the sick. But God has not healed me, and I prayed, and people prayed with me. > That is because your faith is weak, and you have too much sin in your life. If you were a true believer, you would be healed.
  • MaxHoppersGhost 5y ago
    I think Americans are more optimistic and thus are happier. Someone somewhere said it was America’s super power, that we believe things will always get better and it creates a self fulfilling prophecy.
    • martneumann 5y ago
      I once heard that Americans motivate themselves positively: If I manage to finish this work today, great things will happen! ... while Germans motivate themselves negatively: If I don't finish this work today, I'll lose my job, home, family and cat.
      • vbezhenar 5y ago
        That’s questionable. Germany is social state. It has great protections for ordinary people. It’s really hard to lose everything because of bad work. Sounds more like US where you could be fired any minute without warnings.
• robertlagrant 5y ago
  This paper does seem a little dodgy in its assumptions. We shouldn't dismiss military-based studies? Okay, (ish), but then the study doesn't measure happiness vs performance, it measures "how do you rate yourself" vs "the army's selection process for awarding medals". Given medals at least partly exist to reward extremely optimistic behaviour at the expense of personal safety, shall we say, having an optimistic outlook could singularly apply to the field of warfare where individual optimism in the face of unlikely odds is a good thing. This isn't sort of mindset we wouldn't want in our doctors or engineers or bankers, or almost anyone else.
  • vatican_banker 5y ago
    > the study doesn't measure happiness vs performance, it measures "how do you rate yourself" vs "the army's selection process for awarding medals". The author explains that happiness is subjective: > The behavioral science literature often refers to happiness as subjective well-being because the meaning of happiness varies in different contexts ...and then proceeds to delineate how psychology defines happiness: 1. a person’s own assessment of their satisfaction with life; 2. how much positive emotion [...] they experience; 3. and how little negative emotion [...] they experience So yeah, self-rating is an important factor to measuring happiness.
    • disgruntledphd2 5y ago
      Haven't read the full paper, but they probably used this scale" https://ogg.osu.edu/media/documents/MB%20Stream/PANAS.pdf https://ogg.osu.edu/media/documents/MB%20Stream/PANAS.pdf It's relatively standard in the field.
    • robertlagrant 5y ago
      > So yeah, self-rating is an important factor to measuring happiness Well, it's the only measure. I wasn't saying self-rating is bad (although it, of course, is if you're trying to draw objective conclusions), I'm trying to say that performance doesn't equate strongly enough to medals and happiness doesn't relate strongly enough to how people self-report to make any conclusions particularly useful.
• buro9 5y ago
  • cloutchaser 5y ago
    Really? This is your take on this? The happiest country I’ve ever been to is Cuba. How do you explain that in your racism context?
    • jevgeni 5y ago
      Any racial minority outside of Cuba, maybe?
      • cloutchaser 5y ago
        How about extremely poor white people, from terrible backgrounds? Are they intrinsically happier because they are white? And so they get better jobs? How about asians and indian backgrounds who are richer than whites despite being minorities? Should we make them unhappier in your opinion or just discriminate against them? Really? That is your point? From this article, you got... racism. Congrats.
        • jevgeni 5y ago
          Cool distribution tails, bro.
        • themacguffinman 5y ago
          Was the top level comment edited or something? I see "disadvantaged by race, gender, sex, class, mental health, and other forms of discriminitation as well as poverty" which includes a lot of the issues you mentioned, it's you who focused on race exclusively.
          • buro9 5y ago
            It has not been edited.
        • 5y ago
• anisha 5y ago
  Happiness is a lifestate and a choice.
  • artemonster 5y ago
    Care to elaborate? You cannot „choose“ to be happy as you cannot just „choose“ to be not depressed or anything else for that mattter
    • jd115 5y ago
      Of course you choose whether to be happy. In fact, it is the ONLY thing you have control over. But it's the key to everything. It's the one choice you have to make in every living moment. Keep making this right choice, and life is a song. Choose to look the wrong way and life becomes hard work. There is nothing more to it. This is all anyone ever needs to know about life.
      • artemonster 5y ago
        That is just a load of shit, I am so tired of this toxic positivity. Of course its a choice in the first place, but choice is not what brings you there. You need to choose right turn, yes, yes! But you have to walk the path towards the destination and that is a whole different story. If all you postulate that it is enough just to make the right turn, then… ah, whatever.
        • jd115 5y ago
          There can be no such thing as toxic positivity. Your doubts are toxic, yes. But positivity can never be toxic. Life IS utterly binary and clear-cut in this respect, there are no grey areas, no nuances. There is an absolute good and it is joy. And it is 100% a personal choice, regardless of circumstances. Once again - it is the only ONE thing over which you have any control, at all times, no exceptions. You can always choose to be happy. AND that's enough!
          • 5y ago
• neilv 5y ago
  > 1. Measure happiness in both employees and job candidates. In many ways, “hiring the happy” requires a bit of perspective. While we do not believe that happiness should be placed ahead of the knowledge, skills, or talent needed for a job, we conservatively advocate using measures of happiness and optimism as discriminators, or tiebreakers, because the risks are low and the benefits could be important. How is instituting a hiring-time assessment for happiness and optimism going to do anything other than: 1. Sell more interview prep/gaming books and coaching services. 2. Bias hiring disproportionately towards to those who know the ritual of how to answer, as a proxy for class.
  • lnsru 5y ago
    The funny thing is that I went to all job interviews, because I wasn’t happy with my job/unemployment at the time. I have no idea how to fake here more happiness. Currently I am unhappy with technical level at the company and future salary development, but I can’t tell this directly anyway. I guess I need to learn the ritual how to produce right answers.
    • themacguffinman 5y ago
      Say that you're looking for new opportunities and imply that you're currently happy (or at least not unhappy) but you could be even happier at this exciting new company. See, you're not an unhappy person looking to be happy, no one has time for those people, you're a happy person looking to be ecstatic. Positive spin~ Sometimes, people really are just looking for a change and new opportunities, it's not always spin. That plausibility is what makes it the perfect spin. (I take no responsibility for the potentially terrible career advice I'm giving)
      • lnsru 5y ago
        Thanks. This is a good one! Maybe after 5 years in one place I will get different question set than during my job hoping period.
• the_gipsy 5y ago
  I continuous happiness the key success, or is continuous success the key to happiness?
• beebeepka 5y ago
  This reads like a carefully prepared propaganda piece masquerading as science. Can't tell if it's just a promotional material for the US army, or they have more objectives, but I can't agree with most of what is being pushed as "hard data", a.k.a. "science".
• montebicyclelo 5y ago
  > we suggest that leaders follow the science and take a structured approach to hiring for, promoting, and developing employee happiness > Measure happiness in both employees and job candidates. > we conservatively advocate using measures of happiness and optimism as discriminators, or tiebreakers, because the risks are low and the benefits could be important. Good luck getting a job, unhappy people… I don’t think they have the evidence to make this recommendation, since they surveyed people already employed (by the US army), who may have been unhappier pre employment. > might dismiss these results if you believe that military data somehow doesn’t apply to the business world, but you would be wrong to do so. After all, the U.S. Department of Defense is the single largest employer in the world Their entire argument for this also applying outside the military domain seems to be that the military is a very large employer… However, is not the military a vastly different environment from normal civilian workplaces?
  • hathym 5y ago
    even if they recruit only happe people, what guarantee they will stay happy? should they fire them once they are not?
    • VBprogrammer 5y ago
      "The beatings will continue until morale improves."
      • dsq 5y ago
        I had the same thought! There is an 'upbeat filter'.
    • strken 5y ago
      There's something to be said for a world where people don't have to stay in jobs they really hate.
    • allie1 5y ago
      This ties into the most consistent mistake EVERY manager makes - people don't change. I know of maybe 5% of people who do change, but that is so inconsistent and unpredictable that it can't be relied upon. Managers hire "almost great" candidates and think they can affect change and get a good deal, and this NEVER works out. Any red flags on the interviews/trial period will and do persist forever. In the end, it's always the reason the person gets fired, and the company loses the time they invested into the person. based on my experience of 10 years leading tech and marketing teams. Curious if anyone has conflicting experiences to share.
• artemonster 5y ago
  Was anyone in a position when they had everything: good job, good wife, good health and still were deeply unhappy, without purpose? What did you do to solve it?
  • deedeebeard 5y ago
    um....depression? or pre marriage ptsd? you should have a talk with my ex ..
    • artemonster 5y ago
      Not a depression, just an absence of a deeper meaning for life, general „drive“ for it
  • AussieWog93 5y ago
    Not me, but I could imagine many closet homosexuals feeling the way you described. As for how to solve it, well....
  • mellavora 5y ago
    I've been in the "have everything" position (by you def) and also deeply unhappy for long periods of my life. There is a difference between "deeply unhappy" and "without purpose", though the second can lead to the first. I "solved" it by living for duty rather than happiness.
    • artemonster 5y ago
      What kind of dury did you find? Interesting take!
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• randomsearch 5y ago
  Happiness is a temporary feeling caused by a gratifying transition between two states. By that definition, no-one can be happy much of the time. This article is silly. Aim for contentedness and a meaningful life instead. Being content reduces the desire for state change, a major source of unhappiness, and having meaning and purpose in your life will give you a reason to endure the trials of life. A content person with purpose will have many moments of unhappiness, but they will find such periods easier to cope with.
  • _blu 5y ago
    happiness is all about having good relationships in your life. that will give confidence, meaning and the ability to cope with difficulties. Happiness is not a journey inward.
    • istjohn 5y ago
      I totally agree and would love to hear a counter argument from your downvoters. Some of this is just semantics around the word "happiness." I would argue that it's silly to pursue a state of perpetual bliss or enthusiastic joy, but we should absolutely pursue something closer to the Greek concept of eudaimonia[1]. Which is to say, we should seek to be healthy, content, live well, and thrive. And I think even in colloquial English we often mean "happy" in this sense. "They lived happily ever after" surely doesn't mean that they had a smile pasted on their faces in perpetuity. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaimonia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaimonia
• freddealmeida 5y ago
  I ran into some issues these past 2 years. Lost my firm. My friends are always wondering why I'm always happy. I consider it my super power.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• sgfgross 5y ago
  If anyone is interested in the paper itself: https://oa.mg/work/10.1007%2Fs10902-021-00441-x https://oa.mg/work/10.1007%2Fs10902-021-00441-x
• kstenerud 5y ago
  Reminds me of the beginning of the Red Clearance section of the Paranoia second edition handbook. https://cupdf.com/document/paranoia-2nd-edition.html https://cupdf.com/document/paranoia-2nd-edition.html (scroll to page 5)
• gashmol 5y ago
  It reminds me of The Matrix. The machines tried at first to make humans always happy in the virtual world they've created. They did that not out of care for humans, but in order that they could peacefully harvest energy from the oblivious humans' bodies. As I remember it, it didn't go well in terms of production. So, the machines replicated the real not-always-so-happy world instead. I'm not trying to suggest anything btw. Or, am I?
  • mischmasch 5y ago
    What a brilliant thought! In a hypothetical pursuit of the definition of happiness, I tend to lean on an analogy in TCG's (trading cards, yes). Rarity. The machines computed that happiness exists on a spectrum. As with TCG's, there must exist a high ratio of 'common' to feel the implication of pulling a 'mythic'. To be happy, you must experience unhappy?
  • sjostrom7 5y ago
    This article stinks of that feeling from the first sentence. > The toll that working through the global pandemic has taken on employees’ job satisfaction and emotional well-being has focused business leaders on fostering workforce happiness as never before. Yes, I'm sure it's that and not the record-high rates of resignation.
• hyperman1 5y ago
  I had the chance to work with a few people I'd consider genius level. While I'm pretty smart myself, they all have something I don't always have: The ability to be happy in any situation and interested in everything. For example, we were walking trough a hallway. On a wall is an old, damaged, ugly map of my country, half covered with graffiti. I'd walked past it almost every day for half a year. He checks it out, and starts noticing a lot of semi-interesting factoids about names, merged cities, obscure places, old mapping conventions, etc... All of this with an absolute positive energy of pure interest. We spent a fun hour just looking at it. I should have known all this, and yet an hour with him makes me look at it with new eyes. Wherever he was, he instantly attracted a group of friends and wannabe girlfriends, and never really seemed to notice. Same in this case: There was a group of beautiful partygirls we'd never met before, no nerdy interests at all, which accreted around the map in less than 5 minutes. They loved the situation just as much as us nerds did. I learned a lot from him, and try to follow this example, but I still can't do this today and am humiliated (in a positive way) by this way of living.
  • sdevonoes 5y ago
    > The ability to be happy in any situation and interested in everything. I would add: and the ability to share that enthusiasm with others. I consider myself a very average person, but from time to time I do experience what I have highlighted from your paragraph. Most often than not, I keep that enthusiasm to myself. I don't have the ability to share it with others, and when I try, it's not like you have described it.
    • pjc50 5y ago
      Yes. It's a performance; you can never quite be sure of their real emotional state, but they're doing a great job of giving entertainment to people. Usually a combination of being naturally good at it and being rewarded for this kind of performance as kids. It can get discouraged in a lot of people for being "attention seeking".
    • its_bbq 5y ago
      It goes deeper though -- sharing happiness with others is one of the most crucial parts of sustaining happiness. It literally will make you happier and also surrounded by happier people, creating a virtuous cycle of happiness.
• dsq 5y ago
  The beatings (unemployability, no investment for entrepreneurs who aren't 'upbeat') will continue until morale improves.
• bjourne 5y ago
  Most posters on Hacker News doesn't strike me as particularly happy, yet I know they are among the most brilliant hackers in the world. > Retain employees who are happy. The pandemic has reminded us of some tough realities, namely that organizations can contract in turbulent times just as fast as they expand when the economy is booming. In other words, fire those that are unhappy. The bottom line is more important. Compassion is apparently not a useful trait among business executives. People say there is a stigma around depression. I wonder why...
  • kfarr 5y ago
    Agreed with your first point, and to extend with some of my thoughts: I think there is a unique motivation from depression, anger, and other unhappy thoughts. It feels like (although I don't have hard data) that most of the famous and prolific artists (writers, painters, musicians, comedians) turn out to be the most depressed and mentally unstable of us all.
• midjji 5y ago
  There is no doubt in my mind that happiness predicts and causes success. A simple predictor of long term success for everywhere I have worked is mean loud laughs - whining. An old psych study claims that one year after some great or terrible event, winning the lottery, or breaking your back. People are roughly as happy on average as they were before the event. It makes sense in many ways, happiness does not seem to change much over life. To me it looks like happiness is regulated towards some fix point. This is often cited as a reason not to despair, which is nice, but for someone like me it is horrifying. Much like with weight, there is no reason to assume that you are being regulated towards a healthy state. I am successful by most metrics, but I am so despite being miserable, and well aware of it. But it is also a question of what kinds of tasks I focus on, positivity and natural happiness is extremely important for most sales people, and beneficial for teamwork, especially high stress teamwork. But less so for solitary independent work like research, and too much positivity seems to make people easier to scam, and I would prefer a cynic as responsible for it sec (not that I have ever seen one that wasn't). Happiness has a wide range of other positive effects too, but it is difficult to decorrelate, and if I was optimistic Id say something like teamwork and sales are easy to measure, so anything which is positively correlated with work productivity will be biased due to selection bias. If I was pessimistic I think Id just say yeah its probably true, but hey, the world isn't fair, and while I am miserable, at least I'm not stupid, and I would not want those two reversed.
  • louis___ 5y ago
    I'd suggest you try meditation. It does not bring you instant happiness, but slowly brings about a sense of wisdom and peace that really resembles long-term happiness
    • midjji 5y ago
      I have, and you are right. But after a few years I used that wisdom to conclude I prefer a low average with a few severe lows and rare few extreme highs. The latter are great, but mostly it just makes me feel more alive, instead of like some monk serenely walking towards oblivion.
• AitchEmArsey 5y ago
  (Saving the article to read later) My first thought on seeing the title: my experience is that this is a causal loop; the key is not to focus on how good/happy people are at their peak, but how to reverse a downward spiral where decreasing performance and unhappiness are driving each other.
• fleddr 5y ago
  I'm annoyed by employers pretending to care about happiness and mental health. It's usually something like "here's a link to a free one hour e-course on mindfulness". But do take it in your free time. Or the many internal emails from leaders about how they "appreciate" the difficulty of these times. It's all performative, hollow and cheap. If you really claim to care or appreciate it, walk the talk. Give people 1K out of the blue, for sticking to their performance despite enormous challenges. That's still really a pathetically low number. Or...it looks like you're exhausted. Take a few days of on my expense. Or...we normally produce 500 of whatever unit, given the incredibly hard balancing act of you managing your family at home whilst trying to get work done, we'll temporarily slow it down to 400 of whatever unit. All of these are just examples of humane and simple signals to tell that you really do care. If you do none of these things, you don't care. So stop pretending.
  • mojzu 5y ago
    I strongly agree, mental health only seems to be a consideration until it has any affect on output. It's now talked about more openly/included in health and safety courses/etc. which at least seems to be a step in the right direction, but good luck asking for deadlines to be pushed back/or time off for mental health because a project is causing burn out. I'm hoping it's a generational thing that 'puritanical work ethic/expectations' are offered as the solution to all problems but usually dismissed as a potential cause of any
    • fleddr 5y ago
      Sure, a step in the right direction, but to me it still does not meet the low bar of it really being a consideration. I've always seen things like mindfulness and meditation as fighting a symptom. You first put people into this overworked and anxious state of mind and then offer this "fix", rather then addressing the root cause. When people are struggling with mental health at work, reduce the pressure on output and/or give them more free time. It doesn't solve all problems but it's the most meaningful and direct action an employer can take. If an employer cannot afford that or is simply unwilling, I'm cool with that. As long as they admit it and don't pretend to care with a cheap email. Same with appreciating people. Give them money. Stop making it so complicated. Money talks. Nobody cares about HR points.
• kitsune_ 5y ago
  > Even after the researchers controlled for previous performance and a range of demographic factors, soldiers who were the happiest and most optimistic went on to earn significantly more job performance awards across the next five years compared with those who were initially unhappy and pessimistic. How does this study account for the scenario where people are happy because they are on a good career track and others are unhappy because they are not? For instance, someone who wanted to ace an entry exam for a new leadership position but failed to pass. Or someone who notices they lack certain core skills. Or someone who has life obligations or health issues that prevent him from making career progress? I suggest that if you have relative high certainty that you will be successful in the next few years you will be happier on average than when you already know that the following years will be shrouded in stagnation.
  • bradlys 5y ago
    Could be even simpler - you’re unhappy because you got a shit manager. Purely contextual and unrelated to your own ability.
• VMtest 5y ago
  Not sure if this helps, but I bookmarked a relevant thread from the past 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24737026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24737026 | Good sleep, good learning, good life (supermemo.guru)
• throwaway984393 5y ago
  > We saw four times as many awards earned by the initially happiest soldiers They have conflated the idea of winning an award with being a top performer, but winning an award has more to do with being well-liked than being a top performer. There are top performers who don't win awards, and there are people who aren't top performers who do win awards. Really what they've shown is that if you want an award, you should be happy, and people will think you're a top performer. If you don't believe me, wait a bit and people will be citing this study as proof that happiness leads to top performers, hence happy people must be top performers.
• langcalvin 5y ago
  The top performer I know is a legend in my mind. I literally constructed a story in my head that during their gestation in the womb, there was some brain development mistake that the cells literally neglected to apply the synapses that allow frustration. There are glass half full of water people. This top performer is glass half full of: trillions of molecules that allow for the biology the most incredible aggregation of elements in the universe! What a wonder! What a treat to work with them!
• Blackstone4 5y ago
  Honestly I have to agree... for one to be a top performer, attitude needs to be pair with cognitive power as well other factors like health. I have a friend from school who is smart and in good health. However he always critical and points out problems with services and work. Rather than being positive and building things up, he likes to deconstruct and complain. He is then upset as to why he is not doing well in his career after having lost jobs...hard to change ones attitude. Then I play a sport with someone who is always encouraging of others, tries hard and is uplifting. When he is on your team, he adds an X factor and I think this guy, while young, will go far in life and if he wants to, could become a CEO.
  • boldslogan 5y ago
    I think this X-factor, happiness co-efficient or what not...that we see top athletes (who had a natural talent just like other athletes) talk about, which gives them that small edge that lets them be the absolute best instead of just, pretty good at a sport. This kind of makes me think of luck as a quality. I wonder if Big HR FANG companies are "watching" their employees trying to find this X-Factor in a quantitative way. Would be cool trying to think of "work projects" or experiments to find those with X-Factors.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• 0F 5y ago
  Reading these comments is forehead slap inducing. People think that just because something is mental that it has to do with your mindset, your parents, your this your that. When a dude can run faster than other people, it’s written off as genetics. When someone is resilient to depression, it’s anything other than genetics. Both cases are the same: it’s just biological. I’ve been suffering super hard with depression recently and it’s made something clear to me: your mindset is bullshit. It might tip things one way or another but the actual mechanisms of depression will change your life. Everyone will be super humbled when we figure out how to turn off depression, and everyone gets it and everyone experienced on average a 50% boost to their intelligence and productivity. They will be humbled because they will realize that all of that relative suffering was totally pointless and for no other reason than a quirk of evolution. And that some people had it good for absolutely no reason. But it’s exciting to know that this day will come and it can’t come fast enough for me!
  • arius 5y ago
    Depression, like your sports analogy, is not only rooted in genetics but also in the environment. While you can act on your environment, you can't act on genetics for now. Focusing on what is in one's reach is the only thing one can do. Being certain that the cause is out of our control (while true for parts of it) is in itself something fueling depression.
    • 0F 5y ago
      No no no. Nobody is fully aware of the situation but choosing to focus on what they can control. Most of the people in the first world who suffer from depression don’t even realize they have depression. Depression and mindset and sadness are are muddled together in our lexicon — the thing I’m pointing out is that most people don’t even know the truth. For me, knowing that it’s not my actions causing me to feel this way is what saves me. Because for a long time I blamed myself because of the mass ignorance we harbor. The whole reason for the muddling is that the mind naturally tries to put together cause and effect and so depression can hide that way. It’s a fight of intuition against science.
      • 5y ago
• mathgladiator 5y ago
  I have yet to meet a happy principal engineer within two FANG companies I've worked, so maybe this depends on the field.
• hit8run 5y ago
  I don't know about you but I for sure don't want do be a top performer in a job. I disrespect the societal applause you get as a good cog in an enterprise. Build my own stuff and be my own boss makes me happier but then reality hits in and all the cracks in our society begin to show. Seriously. I WANT to be happy. But how can one be happy in a world like this? EDIT: Maybe I'm not in a good mood today but right now I find it really hard to stay positive.
  • k8sToGo 5y ago
    I don't think it is just you and today. I remember when I was younger (college and before) I was happy because I was looking forward to something and envisioned a positive future (e.g. graduation, first job, high salary etc.). Kind of hard to do the same thing these days, especially now that I am an adult. The world has become nothing but an endless grind for greed and corruption. Every day I ask myself what is the point of all this anyways?
    • bradlys 5y ago
      Before you had hope that it could change or that you could change things in your life enough for it to not matter. Then you saw the world didn’t change and that you failed at accomplishing enough for it to not matter. This is the story of most people with ambition. Nothing is new there. The only thing that will keep the light on is keeping the dream alive and thinking that you still have time to do it. That - ultimately - is a mindset shift. (And is hard to do and might feel like a bit of lying but you can shift your goals and mindset to make you stay on that goal ladder)
    • themacguffinman 5y ago
      I don't know if everyone can truly embrace this, but one perhaps useless suggestion is to embrace the absurd life. In his essay "The Myth of Sisyphus", Albert Camus asks: does the absurdity of our futile lives require that we reject life itself? Camus answers: no, it requires revolt. Camus compares the absurdity of the human life with the situation of Sisyphus, a figure of Greek mythology who was condemned to repeat forever the same meaningless task of pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to see it roll down again. He concludes that "The struggle itself ... is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_Sisyphus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_Sisyphus
• mgh2 5y ago
  Does circumstance cause happiness or the other way around? It is the premise of the article, but I think there is confirmation bias here. Office perks had this purpose but it is no longer relevant in a remote culture. Now corporations need to snoop into our homes to predict productivity. Employees' lives outside work is not the employer's business, since most often than not, they will abuse it. Ex: They will sack an employee knowing he is unhappy regardless of the reason, creating a spiraling negative feedback loop. The conclusion is very dangerous. It tells management to measure happiness as a predictor to success (and profit for employer). In fact, it is advocating to use employees' personal life as a proxy for performance, an abuse of data.
• jcims 5y ago
  “Happiness is a cookie that your brain bakes for itself.” https://youtu.be/8mixT5_U0hk https://youtu.be/8mixT5_U0hk
• Xcelerate 5y ago
  I’ve noticed my most successful friends are also my happiest friends, and vice versa. I never knew if it was correlation or causation, but I generally find I am happier myself and perform better if I surround myself with other people like that. Negativity is contagious, so I try to avoid it.
  • umvi 5y ago
    > Negativity is contagious, so I try to avoid it. Positivity is contagious too! I had a co-worker who just exuded genuine positivity, and he was a joy to be around and I couldn't help being in a more positive mood myself.
• bool3max 5y ago
  Happiness and lots of underground drugs!
• ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  Speaking only for myself (pure anecdata), I can say that the last four years or so, have been the happiest of my life, as well as the most productive. Five years ago, was when I left the company that I'd worked for, for 27 years. This was followed, almost immediately, by finding out that the tech industry really doesn't like older workers (which didn't make me happy). I floundered around, for a year or so, being insulted, ignored, and rejected, before I took the hint, and just accepted that I'm in early retirement; whether or not I like it. Since then, I have been insanely productive. I spent a couple of years, "leveling-up," and, a couple of years ago, I found some folks with a nonprofit, that were being "gamed" by the same types of folks that rejected me, and decided to help them out. It's been great.
  • istjohn 5y ago
    I can absolutely believe that there is rampant ageism in tech, but if you don't mind my asking, is it possible part of the difficulty you faced in finding a new job just stemmed from your skills getting a little stale? I ask since you describe spending two years "leveling-up." Have you tried interviewing since?
    • ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
      Oh, it never even got that far. I think I only had two or three leetcode tests, and, of course, they were Binary Tree tests (which I would still be bad at). To be fair, I did have a couple of "take-home" tests, but they were looking for buzzword du jour solutions, as opposed to ones that worked, with half the code, much higher Quality, and twice the performance. My skills were (and have been, since I wrote my first line of code) very relevant, as you can actually easily see, simply by viewing my rather extensive portfolio (which no one ever does). That covers over a decade, and my last checkin was about five minutes ago (in fact, just this second, I got a TestFlight notification that my next build is ready). I never actually stopped coding. But no one ever bothered looking at it. I've mentioned that, here, before. By "leveling up," I was really talking about developing work habits that didn't rely on corporate infrastructure, worked for a standup desk at home, and in a much smaller scope (I used to run a C++ image processing shop, and I have switched to just working on apps in Swift). Once I realized that no one was going to hire me for the skills I used to get paid for, I decided to concentrate on the ones that I enjoyed. Also, I wanted to become much more proficient at Swift. I've been writing it since the day it was announced (and releasing apps, written in it). This had been my "nights and weekends" work, and now, it was my full-time work. If I had been employed, doing this work, I would have had to go through the same adjustments, anyway -maybe. It's quite possible that most corporate stuff is still done in ObjC. Also, I wanted to dedicate a bunch of time to writing stuff. I enjoy writing. It also helps me to be a better programmer and architect. And, I guess the best part of "leveling up," was learning some essential self-respect. Employers don't want employees to have self-respect (well, I did, but, apparently, I'm an outlier. My employers certainly didn't want me to have any). Once I had that, the scales fell from my eyes, and I realized what I was missing. And, no, I never want to work for anyone, ever again. I have become spoiled, by not having my work ignored, destroyed, and misused. That makes me very happy. I suspect that employers wouldn't be happy with my "uppity" attitude.
• crismiquelg 5y ago
  I feel like the key is found at this: "Which comes first, succeeding and then being happy, or being happy and then succeeding? And just how much does initial happiness matter?". Satisfaction in the workplace has A LOT to do in fostering motivation and therefore productivity, creativity... The contrary is burnout, and I bet no one is brilliant in that position
• cosmiccatnap 5y ago
• giantg2 5y ago
  I was happy and a high performer. Now I'm miserable and a low performer. I think it's bidirectional. Being happy helps make people like you and makes you like your job more, so your rating increases more easily. Having a good rating and being respected in your field helps make you happy. If you're getting crushed at your job, you'll likely be unhappy.
• soheil 5y ago
  > In a recent study, the relationship between income and happiness was over four times greater for people who reported that money was important to them compared with those who cared much less about money. In other words believe money can bring you happiness for money to bring you happiness.
• soheil 5y ago
  > If you extrapolate our findings from the military study to a private sector context where 1,000 hires are going to be made, using well-being as a hiring criterion should lead to about 11 more exceptional performers than if the company simply hired personnel without considering well-being at all. And if you extrapolate further, the rest of companies will end up with sad employees , with high turn over, 10x lower productivity thus lower pay and less happy. In fact this will be the common type of company to work for as the happy-employee companies will have very low turn over and won’t be looking for new hires as much.
• bannedbybros 5y ago
• say_it_as_it_is 5y ago
  > 1. Measure happiness in both employees and job candidates. "An employee has no legal obligation to reveal a mental health disorder to an employer. Where an employee's mental health condition comes to light, an employer cannot legally fire the employee for his or her mental health status or for failing to disclose the mental health issues previously"
• dqpb 5y ago
  Certainly it’s system right? High performance -> happiness -> high performance.
• boh 5y ago
  There's something gross in proposing happiness serves "performance". Happiness being defined as a productivity input isn't a great culture to find yourself participating in.
• adolph 5y ago
  This is a pretty typical associational/correlational study where unwarranted causality appears as if magic in the post-study journalism. Does happiness cause better performance? Does better performance lead to happiness? Is some other factor or confounder behind both? If one were to follow the reasoning of the authors, their data also supports disbanding Active Duty and Reserve in favor of National Guard. The next MITSloane story writes itself--part time workers have higher performance: go go gig economy! Characteristic No award Award Effect size Army Component: n (%) Active duty 412,173 (52.28%) 36,761 (28.30%) 0.54 Reserve 179,790 (22.80%) 1,448 (1.27%) 0.06 National Guard 196,423 (24.91%) 76,234 (66.61%) 2.67 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-021-00441-x/tables/2 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-021-00441-x...
• Madmallard 5y ago
  Higher competence just comes from being way healthier genetically in the general case yeah? Why wouldn't they just have it easier across the board? They're likely more stress tolerant, less sickly, have more positive interactions with other people, more attractive to women. Etc.
• deltaonefour 5y ago
  First off did they prove causation? Does happiness cause top performance, does top performance cause happiness, or is there another unknown causative source for both? Second off. There must be an evolutionary reason why less positive people exist.
• softwarebeware 5y ago
  Isn’t this study using the same methodology that was recently debunked? The one about that fake ratio of positive vs negative thoughts? Someone had posted an article about it here in HN.
• nazgulnarsil 5y ago
  Feeling bad is not an intrinsic property of personality but a strategy that is learned via mimicry at a young age. These strategies can be improved via investigation with something like Focusing, Internal Family Systems, or my favorite, Core Transformation.
• kovek 5y ago
  Here’s a video about happiness. It explains that has something to do with our prefrontal cortex (which IIRC is related to intelligence) - https://youtu.be/4q1dgn_C0AU https://youtu.be/4q1dgn_C0AU
• journey_16162 5y ago
  Yeah it is, because it sucks you in. I'm working hard, I have not achieved any significant success yet, but I really love the whole lifestyle of work, work, work. And it's a mish mash, sometimes I get to work on really interesting stuff, sometimes it's super boring, but I learned to appreciate even the boring. Or learn to appreciate pain that comes from doing the same boring thing over and over. I'm big on Zen practice. This is the key for me. I do 40 - 60 min of formal practice every day and I try to put it in other activities, including work. I even have a journal were I measure my mental state based on various objective criteria - i.e. what was my body awareness when I was working - this is somehow makes me love it, and especially the boring stuff, because then it's not only about doing the work, but training my mental state while doing the work. Because the key thing is, and that's the whole reason I write this message, is that if you learn to love something as boring as sitting still or walking circles around the room, and seeing how there's an endless potential for improvement on such a simple thing, you will see that everything is interesting. That kind of engagement can be developed. And I'm talking about engagement, yes. Engagement equals happiness.
  • d0mine 5y ago
    I can't distinguish sarcasm from gpt generated text
• honkycat 5y ago
  You wouldn't know it from my grouchy hacker-news persona, but I am actually a pretty bubbly and happy person in real life. And let me tell you, it takes work! A few years ago I started going to therapy. And I found that a really positive outlet. I wasn't depressed, or angry, or anything like that. I just wanted to do more and be better. And I've now adopted the motto: "Your friends and family are not your therapist" and it is true!! They should be supportive, of course, that is what they are for. But your therapist is someone you pay to tolerate you at your worst and whiniest and to help you plan a path out of where you are. And it worked for me! That is why I advocate for it. I also recently started taking medication, and it has been PHENOMENAL. I am so much more productive!!! --- It can be a bit of a double-edged sword though. I am a bubbly person, but some people find that very annoying. Or they see it as weakness or fae. I feel like people don't realize that it takes me a lot of work to be how I am. It doesn't come naturally, it is a series of decisions I made: 1. To realize I have a problem 2. to seek help 3. To decide take medication
  • mrtranscendence 5y ago
    > Your friends and family are not your therapist It's hard when you live with a therapist who doesn't always turn off therapist-mode when the workday is done ... > I am a bubbly person, but some people find that very annoying. I'll be honest, I do find exceedingly bubbly people kind of annoying. Though not every bubbly person will be annoying; they have to really wear it on their sleeve with cheerfulness that doesn't befit the situation. Or be cheerful and brutally honest, I know a guy like that. You can't criticize someone in the same way you'd wish a five year old happy birthday, c'mon.
• skeeter2020 5y ago
  > A large-scale study found that well-being predicts outstanding job performance. I would expect such a well-respected publication to not make such a fundamental mistake, at least before I finish reading the headline.
• bayesian_horse 5y ago
  So I have another reason to be unhappy about my unhappiness?
• quantified 5y ago
  If this finds widespread adoption in organizations, an entirely new set of minefields open up. The highly bullied children and the children of toxic parents will be somewhat more marginalized as they become comparatively less-happy adults and are kept from better opportunities. Pressure to appear happy will only be greater. You thought everyone on Facebook was happier than you? I’d really like to see a bit more digging in there as to whether removing the happiness-sappers was more or less effective than supporting the happiness-supporters. At the end of the day, “you’re just not happy enough” could become a valid rephrasing of “you’re just not a cultural fit”. These are glass-half-empty perspectives, but there’s no principle that can be applied that can’t be misapplied.